We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can’t possibly happen again. Albert Bates, author of The Financial Collapse Survival Guide and Cookbook, brings you along on his personal journey.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Trump in the Crosshairs

When Trevon Musk released the canopy latch and climbed out, he could not be certain about that. Granted, the place where he found himself was not the place from which he had climbed into the device. The gleaming white pod, now frosted and wafting cold vapor, was sitting in a large storage area surrounded by cardboard boxes with Apple logos.

Musk grabbed his attache from the cockpit then locked the canopy. He examined his surrounds. Nearby he spied an open box of Apple decals on a shelf. He took a large, colorful one, peeled off the vinyl sticker and stuck it on the side of the pod.

He walked through the doors and out into the Apple Store. Unnoticed, he strode through the store and past the glass doors at the front, entering the Roosevelt Field Mall. He turned left, passed Victoria’s Secret and turned right. He passed the entrance to Macy’s then turned into the next corridor. Then he knew for sure.

At the end of that hall, framed between a Tory Burch and Le Pain Quotidien, was the interior façade of Neiman Marcus.

He could not have gone back farther than 2016.

The 100,000 sq. ft. Neiman store was the last piece of a $200 million-dollar mall remodel that had turned Roosevelt Field, in East Garden City, Long Island, into the second-largest shopping mall in the state of New York and ninth in the country. It opened on Friday, February 19, 2016.

Musk knew he had travelled back no farther than that date. He also knew it was not later than October 30, 2019.

He had been only three years old that year, but he remembered his father rushing into his room in their Malibu home, snatching him up and carrying him out to the Audi, speeding up the coast to the California Yacht Club, and the two of them boarding the 50-meter Westport 164 and getting out to sea at full power.

Seared into his memory were the brilliant flashes coming from up and down the coast and farther inland, like a great fireworks display. They were several hundred nautical miles out to sea by then, but it had radiated the skies and created spontaneous auroras.

Musk knew that if his father’s capsule, built with advanced composites developed in their island laboratory and able to create custom wormholes to tunnel through time, had landed any later than October 30, 2019, Roosevelt Field would not be a mall. It would look more like the flat field it was in 1927, when Charles Lindberg lifted off in the Spirit of St. Louis headed for Paris.

Down the corridor to his right, past Williams Sonoma, Aeropostale and Brookstone, Must veered left and found Bobby’s Burger Palace near an outside exit. There by the door was a rack with USA Today and the date: March 25, 2016. Perfect. He was on schedule.

Donald Trump would not yet have Secret Service protection.

Trump just won the Arizona primary and came in a close second in Utah. He had 695 delegates now, and after a very strong showing in the remaining primaries, capped by California on June 7, would have the required 1,237 to clinch the nomination on the first ballot. That, and the Grand Jury indictment handed down against Hillary Clinton in September, and Trump would become President of the United States and Commander in Chief of its military. For all of 1013 days.

Trump would be returning to New York City and landing in a Trump Air jet at East Hampton airport on Sunday, March 27, to be picked up there by a Trump Air helicopter and ferried to his home helipad. There would be a clear shot as he walked from the jet to the copter. Getting close enough for his father’s handcrafted, laser scoped, smart rifle, now carried in his attache case, to do its work would not be a problem. There was cover in several small craft and buildings on the site and none would be searched ahead of time. Finding a safe egress and getting back to the pod in the Apple store could be a little more dicey, but certainly worth whatever the risk.

There is just one problem. When the time finally came to pull the trigger, “click.”

In the winter of 1961, Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set out to construct a mathematical model of the weather, namely a set of differential equations that represented changes in temperature, pressure, wind velocity, etc. Lorenz stripped the weather down to a crude model containing a set of 12 differential equations.

One day, while his computer, a Royal McBee, was printing out the result of a model run, he stepped out for a cup of coffee and when he returned discovered that the printer had run out of paper. By not having a sensor to tell the computer to pause it had simply not printed half of the result.

Lorenz’s Sample Data

After loading more paper, Lorenz decided to save time and restart the run from somewhere in the middle, using the last printout. He entered the conditions at some point near the middle of the run and re-started the run. The data from the second run should have exactly matched the data from the first run, and while they matched at first, the runs began to diverge, slowly, then dramatically — the second run eventually losing all resemblance to the first within a few "model" months.

Weather is, frankly, unpredictable, but mathematics should not be, and neither should computer simulations of weather.

At first Lorenz thought it was hardware malfunction, but after checking, discovered a GIGO problem (garbage in - garbage out) in the data entry. To save space, his printouts only showed three digits while the data in the computer's memory contained six digits. Lorenz had entered the rounded-off data from the printouts assuming that the difference was inconsequential — one thousandth of a degree of temperature; a single drop of rain; an almost imperceptible puff of wind.

Eventually this would lead to the chaos theory and what Lorenz would term “the butterfly effect,” suggesting that a butterfly flapping its wings in North America could affect the weather in China. A tiny variation at the start of a long sequence of events can profoundly alter what happens later.

In other words, everything is connected to everything. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” as John Muir said.

If you could travel back in time to assassinate Hitler when he was a house painter and spare the world The Holocaust, would you? You needn’t bother trying, you would fail anyway.

Kip Thorne was the first theoretical physicist to recognize traversable wormholes and backwards time travel as being theoretically possible under certain conditions. There is nothing in Einstein’s theories of relativity, or quantum physics, to rule out time travel, but it is nonetheless implausible because of the paradox of causality.

“A Predestination paradox occurs when the actions of a person traveling back in time ultimately causes the event he is trying to prevent to occur. He then becomes trapped inside a ‘temporal causality loop’ in which Event 1 in the past influences Event 2 (time travel to the past) which then causes Event 1 to occur, with this circular loop of events thus ensuring that history is not altered by the time traveler’s journey to the past. “

Therefore, you cannot change the past and furthermore, anyone attempting to do so may literally find themselves trapped within a repeating loop of time. See, for instance, Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 (2015) or movies like TimeCrimes (2007), The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009), or Predestination (2014). Astronomy Trek says the best renderings were a Twilight Zone episode called ‘Cradle of Darkness’ and an episode of Dr Who called ‘Let’s Kill Hitler.’

If Trevon Musk, a future progeny of Elon Musk, were to travel back to the past to prevent nuclear war from exterminating the human species, he might discover when he returned to an altered future timeline, that climate change, prevented or postponed in his original timeline by a devastating nuclear winter, had, in the new timeline, already accomplished precisely that.

You can’t time travel back and kill Trump, and killing him now is not something we advocate, either. People can vote, though.

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The Great Change is published whenever the spirit moves me. Writings on this site are purely the opinion of Albert Bates and are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 "unported" copyright. People are free to share (i.e, to copy, distribute and transmit this work) and to build upon and adapt this work – under the following conditions of attribution, n on-commercial use, and share alike: Attribution (BY): You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non-Commercial (NC): You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike (SA): If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. Nothing in this license is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use or other limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner under copyright law or other applicable laws. Therefore, the content ofthis publication may be quoted or cited as per fair use rights. Any of the conditions of this license can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder (i.e., the Author). Where the work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license. For the complete Creative Commons legal code affecting this publication, see here. Writings on this site do not constitute legal or financial advice, and do not reflect the views of any other firm, employer, or organization. Information on this site is not classified and is not otherwise subject to confidentiality or non-disclosure.

Albert Bates, author of The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, brings you along on his personal journey.

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